Actually I've already chosen my plane reading: Cormac McCarthy's latest, No Country For Old Men. (A possibly better review: NYT; Globe & Mail.)

You can see in this choice I've spurned technology, spurned the hip, going back to my roots as it were. Too long among the "coolhunters" and narcissists of marketing. McCarthy knows something about what lies outside cities.

''It starts,'' Bell thinks, ''when you begin to overlook bad manners. Any time you quit hearin Sir and Mam the end is pretty much in sight.''